Books let us live a lot of different lives. They are about the wonder of a single written word, which can make us both happy and sad.
And authors create places where ideas survive. They can take us back to the past, keep us here in the present, or propel us to the future.
Those are the themes of the upcoming Rocky Mountain Book Festival. After being completely sold out in its first year, the Rocky Mountain Literary Festival will be held again this year on Saturday, Oct. 15, at Mount Vernon Country Club on Lookout Mountain. Once again, after being vetted by a committee of 10 readers who spent the better part of the past year evaluating hundreds of new books, five authors have been chosen to speak about theirs. All either are Coloradans themselves, or have written about Colorado.
- New York Times bestselling author and air combat veteran Dan Hampton will talk about “Hunter Killers.” Hampton is one of the most decorated fighter pilots since the Vietnam War.
- Another Times bestselling author, Tim Johnston, will talk about “Descent,” his new thriller about a family vacation in the Rocky Mountains that turns terrifying.
- Laura Pritchett has penned seven novels and she will talk about her newest, “Red Lightning,” about a woman who returns after a long absence to what she calls Nowhere, Colorado, in the high plains.
- Two-time Colorado Book Award winner Manuel Ramos has just produced “The Skull of Pancho Villa and Other Stories,” continuing his theme of noir crime fiction.
- Cynthia Swanson will talk about her debut work of historical fiction, “The Bookseller,” already a New York Times bestseller, which follows a woman in the 1960s through her world of dreams.
Because there had been a scarcity of such events in Colorado, this festival was organized to foster people’s appreciation of books, to enable them to share their passion for reading with authors who have a passion for writing. And an extra benefit is, it raises money for Bootstraps, a non-profit that provides partial (and interest-free) scholarships and loans for graduating high school seniors.
Tickets are available online at .
Greg Dobbs, who will be the moderator of the event, is an author, public speaker, and former foreign correspondent for ABC News. He lives in Evergreen.
